Open Goldberg Variations Project

Since December 2010, IMSLP has been working together with the Open Goldberg Variations project to help produce a new score and recording of Bach’s iconic masterpiece. We are happy to announce that both parts of the project have completed, and are now available on IMSLP.

The Open Goldberg Variations recording was made by pianist Kimiko Ishizaka in the Teldex Studio, Berlin, in January 2012, on a Bösendorfer 290 Imperial. Anne-Marie Sylvestre is the producer. The score was made and edited by Werner Schweer using the MuseScore notation program. Two rounds of public peer review contributed to the high quality of the score.

The works are listed on IMSLP as being governed by the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license, but in fact, have been released into the public domain by the team who created them. It was the intention of the Open Goldberg team to use the Creative Commons Zero (CC0) tool for the licensing, but this option is not yet available on IMSLP.